THE ISLAND TO WHICH Suleiman now turned his attention was a strange anachronism—a freak Christian survivor from the medieval Crusades located within touching distance of the Islamic world. Rhodes is the most substantial and fertile of a belt of limestone islands—the Dodecanese, the twelve islands—that stretches for a hundred miles along the coast of Asia Minor. Rhodes lies at the southwest end of the group; the northern marker is the whitewashed monastery island of Patmos, one of Orthodox Christianity’s holy sites, where Saint John the Divine received the revelations of the New Testament. These islands are so closely intertwined with the bays and headlands of the Asian shore that the mainland is always a presence on the horizon. From Rhodes the crossing is a bare eleven miles, just a couple of hours’ sailing time with a smart wind, so near that on clear winter days the snowy Asian mountains, refracted through the thin air, seem almost within touching distance.
The young Suleiman
When Mehmet took Constantinople in 1453, Christian powers still held the whole of the Aegean Sea in a defensive ring, like an arch whose strength depended on the interdependence of each stone. By 1521, the entire structure had collapsed; yet against gravity, Rhodes, the keystone, survived as an isolated Christian bastion that menaced the Ottomans’ sea-lanes and cramped their maritime ambitions.
Rhodes and its accompanying islands were held in the name of the pope by the last remnant of the great military orders of the Crusades, the Knights of Saint John—the Hospitallers—whose fortunes closely mirrored the whole crusading enterprise. Originally founded to provide care for sick pilgrims in Jerusalem, they had also become, like the Templars and the Teutonic Knights, a military fighting order. Its members took lifelong vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience to the pope; their cardinal purpose was to wage unceasing war on the infidel. The Order of Saint John had fought in every significant action in the long wars of the Holy Land until they were cut down, almost to a man, with their backs to the sea at Acre in May 1291. In exile they searched for a means to continue this struggle, and their eyes alighted on the Greek Christian island of Rhodes. In 1307 they attacked and captured it. Rhodes became Western Christendom’s deep position against the Islamic world, a launchpad from which a new counteroffensive for Palestine could be prepared at some point in the unspecified future.
In the town of Rhodes the knights created a small feudal bastion, a last outpost of the Latin Crusades, subject only to the pope, paid for from the rents on the Order’s huge land holdings in Europe, and dedicated to holy war. The Holy Religion, as the knights called themselves, understood fortified places; they had generations of experience of frontier defense in Palestine. They had constructed Crac des Chevaliers, the greatest of the Crusader castles, and they now fortified the town with bravado and reinvented themselves as sea raiders, building and equipping a small squadron of heavily armed galleys, with which they plundered the Ottoman coasts and sea-lanes, taking slaves and booty.
For two hundred years, the Hospitallers maintained an uncompromising piratical presence on the edge of the Muslim world, holding the Dodecanese as a chain of fortified islands to pen in the Turks. The knights even managed to keep a toehold on the mainland itself, at the fortress the Turks called Bodrum—the castle of Saint Peter the Liberator. The fortress served both as an escape route for Christian slaves and as a propaganda tool for raising funds for the Order’s mission throughout Europe. The knights, well aware of the fate that had befallen the Templars, managed their image carefully as the Shield of Christendom.
European opinion of the knights was mixed. For the Papacy, Rhodes carried a huge symbolic weight as the outer line of defense against the infidel, manning a maritime frontier in continual contraction as the Byzantine inheritance crumbled before the Islamic advance and one by one the bright ring of islands fell to the Ottomans. Pope Pius II lamented that “if all the other Christian princes…had shown themselves as tireless in their hostility to the Turks as the single island of Rhodes had done, that impious people would not have grown so strong.” Even after the fall of Constantinople, Rhodes continued to nourish the Holy See’s most cherished project—the possibility of an eventual return to the Holy Land. Others were less charitable: to Christian maritime traders, the Hospitallers were a dangerous anachronism. The Order’s acts of piracy and blockades of Western trade with Muslims threatened to destabilize the delicate peace on which commerce depended. The Venetians thought the knights indistinguishable from corsairs and regarded them as a menace second only to Ottoman imperial ambitions.
The knights’ impact certainly outstripped their resources. There were never more than five hundred on Rhodes, drawn from the aristocracy of Europe, supported more or less willingly by the local Greek population and mercenaries. They comprised a small well-organized military elite with a powerful sense of mission whose nuisance value was out of proportion to their number. Their galleys lurked in the aquamarine lagoons and rocky inlets of the Asian shore, quick to snatch passing traffic—boatloads of pilgrims from Istanbul bound for Mecca; timber for Egypt from the Black Sea; cargoes of spices from Arabia; honey, dried fish, wine, and silk. Their reputation was fearsome among friend and foe alike. To tackle a Hospitaller galley was to take on a scorpion. “These corsairs are noted for their energy and daring,” wrote the Ottoman chroniclers. “They disrupt life, causing all sorts of losses to merchants, and capturing travelers.” To Muslims, they were, and always had been, the archenemy, the “evil sect of Franks, the worst sons of Error, the most corrupted of the Devil’s spawn” the Muslim general Saladin had slaughtered his Hospitaller captives without compunction during the Crusades. Their allegiance to the pope made them doubly loathsome in Ottoman eyes. Worse still, they ran a market on the island for the sale of Muslim slaves. “How many sons of the Prophet are captured by these children of lies?” mourned the Muslim chroniclers. “How many thousand of the faithful are forced to turn infidel? How many wives and children? Their wickedness knows no end.”
Successive sultans perceived Rhodes as a menace, an affront to sovereignty—and unfinished business. Mehmet had sent a large invasion force to take it and been humiliated. When Selim, Suleiman’s father, captured Egypt in 1517, the position of Rhodes astride the sea route to Istanbul increased the island’s strategic threat. The early decades of the sixteenth century were a time of hunger in the Eastern Mediterranean, and food supplies for the capital were critical. “The said Rhodians are inflicting great losses on the sultan’s subjects,” noted the Venetian diarist Sanudo in 1512, the year the knights captured eighteen grain transports bound for Istanbul and forced up the prices there by 50 percent. Complaints to the sultan grew audible: “They don’t let the ships of merchants or pilgrims bound for Egypt pass without sinking them with their cannon and capturing the Muslims.” To Suleiman this was not just a strategic threat; his position as “head of Muhammad’s community” was at stake. The taking of Muslim slaves on the very doorstep of his realm was intolerable. He now decided to crush “the vipers’ nest of Franks.”
NINE DAYS AFTER SULEIMAN had written his victory letter in Belgrade, the man to whom it was addressed set foot in Rhodes. His name was Philippe Villiers de L’Isle Adam, a French aristocrat who had just been elected grand master of the Order of Saint John. He was fifty-seven years old, the descendant of a family with a long history of dying for the Crusades. His ancestor had conducted the order’s last-ditch defense at Acre in 1291. L’Isle Adam must have been under few illusions about the task ahead. The voyage from Marseilles to take up his post had been ominous with portents. Off Nice, one of his vessels caught fire; in the Malta Channel, the Order’s great flagship, the Saint Mary, was blasted by a lightning bolt. Nine men fell dead; a crackle of electricity flashed down the grand master’s sword, reducing it to twisted scrap, but he stepped away from the scorched deck unharmed. When the ships put in at Syracuse to repair the storm damage, they found themselves shadowed by the Turkish corsair Kurtoglu, cruising offshore with a powerful squadron of galleys stripped for war. Under
cover of darkness, the knights quietly slipped from the harbor and outran their pursuers on a westerly wind.
When he read Suleiman’s letter, L’Isle Adam framed a terse response, distinctly short of pleasantries and any recognition of the sultan’s grander titles. “Brother Philippe Villiers de L’Isle Adam, Grand Master of Rhodes, to Suleiman, sultan of the Turks,” it began. “I have right well comprehended the meaning of your letter, which has been presented to me by your ambassador.” The grand master went on to recount the attempt by Kurtoglu to capture the ship on which he was traveling, before concluding with an abrupt “Farewell.” At the same time, he dispatched a parallel letter to the king of France: “Sire, since he became Grand Turk, this is the first letter that he has sent to Rhodes, and we do not accept it as a token of friendship, but rather as a veiled threat.”
L’Isle Adam was well aware what was likely to unfold—the knights’ intelligence was excellent and they had been bracing themselves against attack for forty years. The early years of the sixteenth century ring with their appeals to the pope and the courts of Europe for men and money. After the Ottoman capture of Egypt in 1517, the menace of the Turk loomed larger than ever. The Christian sea began to tremble in dreadful anticipation. Pope Leo was almost paralyzed by fear: “Now that the Terrible Turk has Egypt and Alexandria and the whole of the Roman eastern empire in his power and has equipped a massive fleet in the Dardanelles, he will swallow not just Sicily and Italy but the whole world.” It was obvious that Rhodes was the front line in a gathering storm. The grand master renewed his appeals for help.
The unified response of Christendom was exactly zero. Italy, as Suleiman well knew, was a battleground between the Hapsburg kings of Spain and the Valois of France; Venice, bloodied in her earlier struggle with the Turk, had opted for treaties of friendship; while Martin Luther’s reformation was beginning to split the Christian world into fractious shards. Successive popes unceasingly jabbed the conscience of the secular potentates of Europe to no avail, and dreamed up fantasy schemes for crusades. In more lucid moments the popes bewailed the disarray of Christendom. Only the knights themselves rallied from their command posts across Europe, but their numbers were pitifully small.
Undeterred, L’Isle Adam began preparing for siege. He dispatched ships to Italy, Greece, and Crete to buy wheat and wine. He oversaw the clearing out of ditches and the repairing of bastions and the operation of gunpowder mills—and tried to stifle the hemorrhaging of information across the narrow straits to the sultan’s lands. In April 1522, the unripe wheat was harvested and the ground outside the town stripped of cover and scorched. A pair of massive iron chains was hauled across the harbor mouth.
Four hundred fifty miles away in Istanbul, Suleiman was gathering a huge army and fitting out his fleet. The hallmark of any Ottoman campaign was the ability to mobilize men and resources on a scale that paralyzed their enemy’s powers of calculation. Chroniclers tended to double or triple the reasonable estimate of a force that could be assembled and supplied for war—or simply gave up; “numerous as the stars” was a common epithet of appalled defenders crouching behind their battlements at the sight of the vast host of men and animals and tents camped outside. In this spirit, the expedition to Rhodes was put at an inflated two hundred thousand men and a mighty armada of ships, “galleasses, galleys, pallandaries, fustes and brigantines to the number of 300 sails and more.” L’Isle Adam decided against counting his men too carefully. There were so few of them, it would be bad for morale, “and he feared that the Great Turk might have knowledge by goers and comers into Rhodes.” In all likelihood there were five hundred knights and fifteen hundred mercenaries and local Greeks to defend the town. The grand master decided on a series of morale-raising parades, whereby the various companies “decked their men with colours and devices” and mustered “with the great noise of trumpets and drums.” The knights in their red surcoats bearing white crosses made a cheerful array.
When Mehmet had besieged Rhodes in 1480, he had not attended in person. He stayed in Istanbul and sent his commander. Suleiman resolved to make a personal call on “the damnable workers of wickedness.” Any sultan’s presence upped the stakes in a military campaign enormously. Defeat was inadmissible; failure by any corps commander meant dismissal—or death. Suleiman was coming only to win.
ON JUNE 10 THE KNIGHTS received a second letter, this time stripped of diplomatic niceties:
The Sultan Suleiman to Villiers de L’Isle Adam, Grand Master of Rhodes, to his Knights, and to the people at large. Your monstrous injuries against my most afflicted people have aroused my pity and indignation. I command you, therefore, instantly to surrender the island and fortress of Rhodes, and I give you my gracious permission to depart in safety with the most precious of your effects; or if you desire to remain under my government, I shall not require of you any tribute, or do anything in diminution of your liberties, or against your religion. If you are wise, you will prefer friendship and peace to cruel war. Since, if you are conquered, you will have to undergo all the miseries as are usually inflicted by those that are victorious, from which you will be protected neither by your own forces, nor by external aid, nor by the strength of your fortifications which I will overthrow to their foundations…. I swear this by the God of heaven, the Creator of the earth, by the four Evangelists, by the four thousand prophets, who have descended from heaven, chief amongst whom stands Muhammad, most worthy to be worshipped; by the shades of my grandfather and father, and by my own sacred, august and imperial head.
The grand master did not deign a reply. He concentrated his efforts on the manufacture of gunpowder.
On June 16 Suleiman crossed the Bosphorus with his army and proceeded to make his way down the Asian coast to the crossing place to Rhodes. Two days later the fleet set sail from its base at Gallipoli, carrying heavy guns, supplies, and more troops.
DESPITE THE HUGE DISCREPANCY in numbers, the contest was less one-sided than it appeared. When Ottoman armies had surrounded the town of Rhodes in 1480, they looked up at a typical fortress of the medieval world. The thin, high walls, designed to resist scaling by ladders and siege engines, were horribly vulnerable to sustained gunfire. By 1522, the defenses had been largely remodeled. The knights may have been backward-looking in their ethos and sense of mission, but when it came to military engineering, they were early adopters. In the forty years of peace, they had spent their spare cash commissioning the best Italian engineers to strengthen their redoubts.
This work was undertaken on the cusp of a revolution in military architecture. The gunpowder age and the development of accurate bronze cannon that fired penetrative iron balls were revolutionizing fortress design. Italian military engineers developed their discipline as a science. They mapped geometric angles of fire with compasses and used knowledge of ballistics to design radical solutions. At Rhodes, the engineers constructed prototypes of this new military engineering: massive walls, angled bastions of immense thickness that commanded wide fields of fire, slanted parapets to deflect shot, mountings for long-range guns, splayed gun ports, inner defensive layers with concealed batteries, double ditches excavated to the depth of canyons, counterscarps that exposed an advancing enemy to a torrent of fire. The new principles were depth defense and cross fire; no enemy could advance without being hit from multiple vantage points, nor could he be sure what traps lay within. Rhodes in 1522 was not just the best-defended city on earth, it was also a laboratory of siege warfare. The labor for this enterprise was largely supplied by enslaved Muslims, one of whom was a young seaman called Oruch, destined neither to forget nor forgive the experience.
In layout, the town was as round as an apple with a bite taken out of one arc, where the protected harbor was let into the town. The knights fought in national groups so that the defense of the circle was divided into eight sectors, each with its tower, managed by a particular country. England held one sector, Italy another; Auvergne commanded the most redoubtable bastion of all; then Germany, Castile,
France, Provence, and Aragon.
Despite failing to draw substantial Western aid, L’Isle Adam had a small stroke of luck. From Crete he managed to recruit the services of one of the great military engineers of the day, Gabrielle Tadini, “a most brilliant engineer and in the business of war a supreme expert in mathematical science.” Tadini was nominally in the pay of the Venetians, who were utterly opposed to his participation, which would be seen as a breach of their neutrality. The knights smuggled him off the island at night from a deserted cove. It was a cheering coup. Tadini, craggy, spirited, innovative, and brave, was worth a thousand men. He set to work adjusting the defenses, measuring distances and fields of fire, fine-tuning the killing zones.
It was on the feast day of Saint John, June 24—the most holy day in the knights’ year—that the Ottoman fleet made a first tentative landing on the island. Two days later the fleet came to anchor six miles south of the town and started the lengthy process of unloading equipment and ferrying men and materials across from the mainland. In a solemn ceremony, the grand master laid the keys to the city on the altar of the saint’s church, “beseeching St John to take keeping and protection thereof and of all The Religion…and by his holy grace to defend them from the great power of enemies that had besieged them.”
It took two weeks for the Ottomans to bring everything across. Onto the shore they unloaded a comprehensive lexicon of artillery pieces: bombards and basilisks, serpentines, double guns, and pot guns. These fired an exotic range of projectiles intended to fulfill specific purposes in the pattern of attack: giant stones nine feet in circumference, and penetrative iron balls propelled at explosive velocity, for battering and puncturing walls; brass firebombs that fragmented and spread flaming naphtha “to make murder of the people’ high-trajectory mortar bullets. Even biological weapons: some cannon were expressly designed to hurl rotting corpses over the walls.
Empires of the Sea Page 2